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December 29, 2021 - August 9, 2022
“What is most interesting about Joseph Smith,” Bushman writes in a sentence of breathtaking understatement, “is that people believed him.”
America was created by people resistant to reality checks and convinced they had special access to the truth, a place founded to enact grand fantasies.
Which was among the greatest illustrations of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Excitable people abandoning settled lives and civilization to travel thousands of miles west to a wilderness utopia? And a wilderness that was truly garden-like, a western Eden occupied by a few exceptionally docile natives? And gold for the plucking? The rush to California in the 1800s was unmistakably a mythic replay of America’s invention, providential adventure redux.
Disbelieving in mermaids isn’t proof that this creature isn’t a mermaid.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states and towns could legally require citizens to be vaccinated against smallpox and other infectious diseases—that Americans’ constitutional right to believe and promote whatever they wished did not give “an absolute right in each person to be, in all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint.”
California is America squared.
“In Los Angeles,” the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once wrote, “you can live any way you want (except the urban way); it’s the fantasy-brothel, where you can live the fantasy of your choice.”
No other developed country has such a huge fraction of its people living at such low densities on such massive amounts of land.
“Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.”
The 1960s gave license to everyone in America to let their freak flags fly—superselfish Ayn Randians as well as New Age shamans; fundamentalists and evangelicals and charismatics; Scientologists, homeopaths, spiritual cultists, and academic relativists; left-wing and right-wing conspiracists; war reenactors and those abducted by Satan or extraterrestrials; compulsive pornhounds and gamblers and gun-lovers.
The new ultraindividualism extended well beyond lifestyle choices. Finding your own truth and doing your own thing came to mean not just getting high and watching porn but objecting to irreligious public education and owning as many guns of any kind as you wished.
We’re a populist democracy of individualists, so too much democracy and individualism were always going to be the directions in which we finally erred.
Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.
There are real consequences in the real world. Delusional ideas and magical thinking flood from the private sphere into the public, become so pervasive and deeply rooted, so normal, that they affect everyone.
And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies. You may not want democratic socialism, but Denmark is a real country.
